The present invention relates to information processing system configuration design supporting technologies for supporting the configuration design of an information processing system, and more particularly to technologies effective for being applied to information processing system configuration design supporting technologies for supporting the design of a configuration constituted of a plurality of apparatuses interconnected by a network by considering the schedule and cost of each apparatus.
Network configuration works for configuring a plurality of apparatuses via a network are increasing. The works of selecting hardware and software to be used for configuring such a network are very complicated and require a large amount of information. In order to solve this, many techniques have been proposed for visually and interactively performing network configuration works (e.g., refer to JP-A-6-187396).
According to these techniques, abstract figures representative of apparatuses are disposed and wired by a pointing device or the like to conduct a network design on a screen of an information processing terminal, and the attribute of each apparatus constituting the network and the relation among apparatuses are set and the adequacy of this information is verified.